Joy Bright Hancock as a Navy Yeoman (F) in 1918 and as captain and director of the WAVES in 1946 shows the evolution of women’s roles in the Navy and their uniforms.
Women have answered America’s call to arms since the Revolutionary War, with and without official uniforms to wear.
Uniforms were nonexistent for American women who wanted to fight alongside their male counterparts during the 18th and 19th centuries.
‘‘Women were volunteers and were not official members of the military,” said Nathaniel Patch, an archivist on staff at the National Archives in College Park, Md., who has researched women’s role in the Navy.
Determined to serve their country, some women fought unofficially wearing soldier’s uniforms or uniforms they devised for themselves.
A small group of women were employed as contract nurses by the Navy during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The nurses worked in Navy hospitals and aboard Navy ships. They wore full-length white dresses with small white caps.
The Congress formally established the United States Navy Nurses Corps in 1908. Twenty women were selected as the first members, and were referred to as ‘‘The Sacred Twenty.” They became the first women to serve formally as members of the Navy. Their uniform was similar to that worn by nurses during the Spanish-American War.
Navy nurses gradually expanded to 160 at the beginning of World War I. Nurses not only had normal hospital and clinic duties, they also trained United States nurses assigned overseas and the male enlisted naval medical personnel.
‘‘When the nurses corps was formed, [women] were still considered separate from the military as a whole,” said Patch.
Women were allowed to join the reserves under the Naval Act of 1916, he said. They were referred to as yeomanettes, although they were officially designated as yeoman (F).
‘‘Yeomanettes were not nurses,” said the archivist. ‘‘They were women with the rank of yeoman.”
Patch said yeomanettes were given noncombat duties with administrative work. They had a single style of uniform in white and blue, which included hat, blouse, jacket, skirt, stockings and shoes.
After 1920, the yeomanettes were disbanded and so was everything associated with the rank, including uniforms, said Patch.
In August 1942, the Navy established the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES).
Patch said the Navy was better prepared for women to enlist because the yeomanettes had shown the value of women in the military.
The style of dress for Navy women during World War II is also attributed to the yeomanettes.
‘‘With the Yeomanettes, the Navy gave women who enlisted a general description of what is appropriate for the Navy,” said Patch. ‘‘The Navy provided insignia and rank patches.”
Unlike the yeomanettes, the WAVES were not disbanded following the end of World War II, he said. By 1948, women were granted permanent status in the Navy.
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